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Here are a few random notes on things in Rubrik‘s Cloud Data Management (CDM) 4.1.1-p4-2319 that I’ve come across in my recent testing in the lab. There’s not enough in each item to warrant a full post, hence the “few notes” format. Note that some of these things have been around for a while, I just wanted to note the specific version of Rubrik CDM I’m working with.

Guest OS Credentials

Rubrik uses Guest OS credentials for access to a VM’s operating system. When you add VM workload to your Rubrik environment, you may see the following message in the logs.

Note that it’s a warning, not an error. You can still backup the VM, just not to the level you might have hoped for. If you want to do a direct restore on a Linux guest, you’ll need an account with write access. For Windows, you’ll need something with administrative access. You could achieve this with either local or domain administrator accounts. This isn’t recommended though, and Rubrik suggests “a credential for a domain level account that has a small privilege set that includes administrator access to the relevant guests”. You could use a number of credentials across multiple groups of machines to reduce (to a small extent) the level of exposure, but there are plenty of CISOs and Windows administrators who are not going to like this approach.

So what happens if you don’t provide the credentials? My understanding is that you can still do file system consistent snapshots (provided you have a current version of VMware Tools installed), you just won’t be able to do application-consistent backups. For your reference, here’s the table from Rubrik discussing the various levels of available consistency.

Consistency level

Description

Rubrik usage

Inconsistent

A backup that consists of copying each file to the backup target without quiescence.

File operations are not stopped The result is inconsistent time stamps across the backup and, potentially, corrupted files.

Not provided

Crash consistent

A point-in-time snapshot but without quiescence.

• Time stamps are consistent

• Pending updates for open files are not saved

• In-flight I/O operations are not completed

The snapshot can be used to restore the virtual machine to the same state that a hard reset would produce.

Provided only when:

• The Guest OS does not have VMware Tools

• The Guest OS has an out-of-date version of VMware Tools

The VM’s Application Consistency was manually set to Crash Consistent in the Rubrik UI

File system consistent

A point-in-time snapshot with quiescence.

• Time stamps are consistent

• Pending updates for open files are saved

• In-flight I/O operations are completed

• Application-specific operations may not be completed.

Provided when the guest OS has an up-to-date version of VMware Tools and application consistency is not supported for the guest OS.

Application consistent

A point-in-time snapshot with quiescence and application-awareness.

• Time stamps are consistent

• Pending updates for open files are saved

• In-flight I/O operations are completed

• Application-specific operations are completed.

Provided when the guest OS has an up-to-date version of VMware Tools and application consistency is supported for the guest OS.

open-vm-tools

If you’re running something like Debian in your vSphere environment you may have chosen to use open-vm-tools rather than VMware’s package. There’s nothing wrong with this (it’s a VMware-supported configuration), but you’ll see that Rubrik currently has a bit of an issue with it.

It will still backup the VM, just not at the consistency level you may be hoping for. It’s on Rubrik’s list of things to fix. And VMware Tools is still a valid (and arguably preferred) option for supported Linux distributions. The point of open-vm-tools is that appliance vendors can distribute the tools with their VMs without violating licensing agreements.

Download Logs

It seems like a simple thing, but I really like the ability to download logs related to a particular error. In this example, I’ve got some issues with a SQL cluster I’m backing up. I can click on “Download Logs” and grab the info I need related to the SLA Activity. It’s a small thing, but it makes wading through logs to identify issues a little less painful.

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The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of my employers, previous or current. This is my blog.

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